


in a tomb by the sounding sea

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M, Sirens, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-10
Updated: 2016-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-27 19:20:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6296830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain America had a voice clearer than a trumpet, sharper than the point of a bayonet at the first charge. (Sarah Rogers had always smiled when Steve came home still brimming with cries for justice, Bucky following behind him with bloodied hands.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	in a tomb by the sounding sea

**Author's Note:**

> Title bastardized from Edgar Allan Poe's _Annabel Lee_. As always, these are all from tumblr prompts, and my eternal gratitude to cabloom for editing them.

The Commandos never wondered why they agreed to rejoin the war.  When the biographers came years later, with their staticky tape recorders and the hero worship bright in their young eyes, the men had shrugged.

“We were a bunch of idiots,” Monty offered, holding the shattered pieces of a pipe that Gabe had filled with Stark explosives before the meeting began.

“ _Were_?” Morita echoed, staring at Falsworth’s singed eyebrows and Jones’s smirk.

“Rogers barely had to ask,” Dum Dum reminisced, the whiskey in his hand soothing the catch in his voice at their Captain’s name.  “Of course, he waited until we were on our fourth pitcher of beer.”

“Do you remember?” Dernier cut in, waving his cigarette into their circle, the orange glow winding through the air like a pilotless plane.  “Before.”  He shook his head, dropped his hand to rub at his wrists where Hydra had kept them shackled during the day.  “Sarge always told us that no one could say no to Steve.”

Morita chuckled, distracting the young reporters from the flask the others were tipping into their drinks.  “No one ever did say no to Cap,” he declared, shaking his head to brush the graying hair out of his eyes.  “Especially when it came to the war.”

Jones poured himself a fresh glass of whiskey and finished it off in one long swallow.  He didn’t say a word about the night that Sarge had settled next to him during his midnight watch, rolling a ball of wax between slender fingers, dirt and gun oil streaked across his hands.   _Sometimes_ , Sarge had whispered, handing over the wax without meeting Jones’s questioning gaze, his shoulders hunched, staring through the dark with a sniper’s unerring aim.  Staring at Steve.   _Sometimes, Gabe, Steve gets a little … carried away.  Make sure you plug your ears._

Gabe polished off the flask, and didn’t think about finding Rogers alone in the train car, mountain air whipping past his face.  He couldn’t remember what had happened after that, just the sibilant hiss of Cap’s voice and the welcome weight of the gun in his hands, blinking awake minutes later to feel the blood running down his cheek, clutching a gun emptied of bullets and surrounded by the dead.

After that, Gabe had always remembered to plug his ears.

***

Sarah Rogers had met Joseph in Ireland, she told the boys, running thin fingers through their downy hair, lulling them to sleep.  His troop ship had run into bad weather off the stormy Irish coast, must have gotten turned around in the waves and ended up on the rocks.  Maybe they were hit by a U-Boat, Steve muttered, voice slurred with sleep.

Bucky watched Sarah smile, and didn’t flinch at the glint of her green eyes and white teeth.  She caught him staring and rolled her eyes, raising an eyebrow at the blond boy laying between them.  Bucky bit down his giggles, and never told Steve that a submarine couldn’t get that close to the rock-strewn coast.

She had found Joseph on the beach, she continued softly, half-drowned.  Bucky thought of his uncle’s nostalgic sketches of the western shores, cliffs that dropped straight into the sea with no beach at all, nothing like Coney Island with its shallow waves and hot sand. He curled a little closer into Steve.

Joseph Rogers said Sarah was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.  She had patched him up, and loved him, and held back her tears when he marched off into the war and never came home.

She told them stories, at night, and Steve complained that she never sang to them, not like Mrs. Barnes sang old ballads and hummed the lullabies her grandmother had sung, melodies leftover though they no longer knew the words.  Mrs. Rogers blew a raspberry on her son’s cheek, tousled his hair and sang all four verses of Roddy McCorley in a clear voice sharper than the peal of the church bell on Sundays, echoing through Bucky’s small chest like a cresting wave.

Then she pushed them out the door to play, and Bucky broke his knuckle on Timmy Houlihan’s face.

***

“I don’t want you hanging around with that Rogers boy,” Bucky’s father demanded, a heavy hand on Bucky’s shoulder pinning him in place.  “Your teachers say he’s always starting fights, or that you’re starting them, that boy’s forked tongue in your ear.”

Steve hated bullies, railed at them in a high, thin voice that rippled through Bucky’s veins, left him breathing hard with the taste of copper in his mouth and bruises blooming on his hands.

He started going home with Steve, after, because Sarah Rogers never seemed angry when they stumbled in with torn shirts and swollen eyes.  She smiled when Steve leaped up to reenact Bucky’s fight, making Bucky look like a hero and not a stupid third-grader outnumbered four to one.

“Why aren’t you angry?” Bucky wondered, ten years old and finally brave enough to ask, long used to the sea glass of Mrs. Rogers’s eyes and the press of her teeth into her bottom lip.  Steve lay between them, sleeping fitfully through the fever radiating from his skin.  “Aren’t you worried he’ll be hurt, fighting like we do?”

Sarah laughed, the sound ringing through the dank room like the hollow echo of a knife against an empty glass, calling for a toast.  She ruffled Steve’s damp hair.  “He’s fine,” she told Bucky, less concerned than the doctors always were.  “He just has too much water in his lungs.”

Joseph Rogers had drowned off the Irish coast and met the most beautiful woman in the world.  Bucky shivered, and blamed it on the sweat soaking his shirt to his skin.

“And the fighting?” he asked, swaying toward Steve without coming near enough for Mrs. Rogers to touch, pressing the words over the catch in his throat because he was never going to be brave enough to ask again.

“Some of us are born for violence,” Steve’s mother breathed, quieter than Steve’s sputtering snores at her side.  She leaned forward, pressed a gentle kiss to her son’s overheated brow.  “And some of us are called to it, Jamie boy.”  Mrs. Rogers lifted her head and gazed at him without blinking, her green eyes sharp as the rocks that feasted on the bones of ships lost at sea.

“Is there a choice?” Bucky whispered, his hand wrapped too tight around Steve’s, squeezing his friend’s limp fingers until they went white at the tips.

“There’s always a choice.”  Sarah Rogers straightened up, and Bucky leaned into her touch when she brushed clammy fingers through his uncombed hair.  “You can fight, child, or you can drown.  It’s up to you.”

***

The first time Bucky kissed Steve, the other boy sunk his teeth into Bucky’s bloody lip and Bucky shoved Steve hard into the wall, the rasp of bricks scratching pink lines down his pale skin.

Steve had a voice like a clarion call, like the trumpet that had brought down city walls.  Steve had a voice that lured men to their feet and left bodies in his wake, his smile sharp and his blue eyes glinting like the last patch of sky a man would ever see.

Bucky licked the blood from Steve’s mouth, pushed him back into the mattress and made him keen, voice high and thready and thrumming with the promise of a hurricane, the storm pounding through Bucky’s veins.

You could fight, or you could drown.  Bucky fisted his hands in Steve’s hair, pulled bruises on the porcelain skin of his throat, and waited to be swallowed by the waves.

**Author's Note:**

> There's a lot of mythology for sirens (shocking), so I stayed vague enough that it all fit a little too well into canon Steve Rogers. Sirens lure men to their doom, to a violent end; they sing an irresistible song (and you can fight or you can drown, your choice to die with your head below the water, or on the rocks gasping for air).


End file.
